Lisbeth Redfield
Build a Better Bird-Trip: the Relevance of “Springe” to Hamlet
In Act I, scene 3 Polonius tells his daughter, dismissively, that the gifts offered her are “springes to catch woodcocks” (1.3.114). This word, springe, appears once more in the play: when Laertes explains that he has been caught “as a woodcock to [his] own springe” (5.2.289). Through these two uses, the word becomes associated with ideas of trickery, often of a facile nature, and with the fates of those caught in such a trickery. It draws attention to both perpetrator and victim, and the ease with which such traps are set.
Springe is a simple, archaic word with only one literal and one figurative definition. The OED defines it as “a snare for catching small game, especially birds” (OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “springe,” 1). The word appears both times in conjunction with another: “woodcock,” a type of small game bird or, “in allusive use…in reference to capture by some trickery…hence applied to a person: a fool, simpleton, dupe” (OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “woodcock,” 2). This is not only a trap, but a simple one, easy to design and easy to avoid.
The word, and more especially the phrase, comments simultaneously on he who sets the trap and he who is trapped. Polonius dismisses Hamlet’s attempts to court Ophelia as “springes” and in doing so, criticizes both Hamlet for trifling and his daughter for yielding. Laertes is ashamed that he has been affected by his own trick and, ruefully, falls back on a metaphor of simple traps and foolish birds. In its metaphorical sense, the phrase “springes to catch woodcocks” suggests that such springes are easily made and only the absent-minded are caught in them.
There is, however, something deeply ironic about this assumption. Who delivers the line is important and the fact that this particular phrase comes from Polonius has an almost comic effect. This is, remember, a man who suggests all manner of facile schemes and simple tricks throughout the play. Laertes’s use of springe is more noticeably ironic because neither his trap nor his prey are simple. What Claudius suggests as a straight-forward idea with a contingency plan becomes, with Laertes’s help, far more complex and immediately dangerous. This trap is not exactly simple (it kills four characters, nearly five), and neither is Hamlet, the intended prey. A principle of contradiction is in action here, and the disjunction created by using the diminutive to describe to something large makes the object in question seem larger.
Trapping is a popular pastime at the court of Denmark and every character in the play is involved in a plot to trap someone else. The largest trap in the play is Hamlet’s “The Mousetrap” (3. 2. 233). A trap for a mouse has similar connotations of minor importance; a small trap for a diminutive target. But like Laertes’s springe, Hamlet’s mousetrap is anything but minor. It is an elaborate work into which he has put a good deal of effort, and for a very important cause. His comment that, “the play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (2.2.543-4) makes it clear that there is far more at stake here than household pests.
Hamlet is a play full of dense linguistic references and image clusters which support various ideas or themes. Even the smaller or simple ideas relate to the play. The idea of springes or traps adds to the image clusters of deceit and confinement that run throughout Hamlet. This motif is relevant both to the theatrical concerns of the play (elaborate traps and deceptions are a standard device of various theatrical genres) and the more political agenda (the common interest and participation in small plots emphasizes the rampant deceit of the Danish court). So we see that this small, surprisingly evocative, word is relevant to larger themes in the play.